ABSTRACT Polynesian societies have long framed discussions of chiefdoms. Often, these discussions treat Polynesia as a relatively homogenous region. Despite this, substantial variability in political forms developed in the region that came to affect the structure and nature of archaeologically attested past communities. Here we use two case studies to highlight these patterns: the Manuʻa group in West

ABSTRACT Ongoing discussions about the problems of white supremacy and colonialism in archaeology are useful but have not, thus far, fully considered the exacerbated effects of these issues on small islands. In this opinion piece, we, two white women academics from the Global North with extensive experience working in the Dutch Caribbean and the Hawaiian Islands, observe these exacerbated effects in

ABSTRACT This paper employs a historiographical approach to review the allied fields of Egyptology and Egyptian Archaeology in relation to studies of disability and bodily differences in ancient Egypt. We incorporate critical disability studies and embodiment theories to consider whether ableism is prevalent across these disciplines. The focus of this study has been inverted from ‘identifying’ disability

ABSTRACT House size is often used as a tool to calculate wealth in ancient societies, and thus it is also a potential source for the study of inequality. The site of Pompeii, on the Bay of Naples in southern Italy, was first inhabited about 800 years before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried it 79 CE. The city provides one of the largest data sets of private architecture in the Roman world, and

ABSTRACT Offshore landmasses in the Western Pacific were colonized during the Late Pleistocene through deliberate seafaring by modern humans. However, our knowledge of the developmental process of the Palaeolithic seafaring is still limited due to lack of reliable chronology for such seafaring. To contribute to this issue, we synthesize lines of evidence on repeated sea-crossings over the Korea/Tsushima

ABSTRACT Organic remains from excavated sites include a wide range of materials, from distinct organisms (‘ecofacts’) to biomolecules. Biomolecules provide a variety of new research avenues, while ecofacts with longer histories of study are now being re-harnessed in unexpected ways. These resources are unlocking research potential, transcending what was previously imagined possible. However, this ‘organics

ABSTRACT The appropriation of local ritual practices and their expansion as part of the Inca imperial ideology is a well-documented mode of dominance in the Central Andes. However, there is still no relevant evidence on how it worked in the southern areas of the empire. We show how the Incas might have appropriated some local ritual practices that consisted of burying caches of skulls with perforations

ABSTRACT The growing rate of global inequality, on the one hand, and hyper-consumerism, particularly among higher socio-economic classes in developed countries, on the other, have resulted in the emergence of new forms of subsistence, lifestyles and settlement types where subaltern groups and populations live and work. This paper investigates the emergence of two of these kinds of settlement in Tehran

ABSTRACT Maritime migration and island adaptation by anatomically modern humans (AMH) are among the most significant current issues in Southeast Asian archaeology and directly related to their behavioural and technological advancement. In the center of this research hotspot are the Wallacean islands, situated between the Pleistocene landmasses of Sunda and Sahul. Two major migration routes have been

ABSTRACT The crossing of the Wallacean islands and settlement of Sahul by modern humans over 50,000 years ago, represents the earliest successful seafaring of our species anywhere in the world. Archaeological research throughout this vast island archipelago has recovered evidence for varied patterns in island occupation, with accumulating evidence suggesting a significant change in cultural activities

ABSTRACT The occupation of Buang Merabak, a cave located on the island of New Ireland, by 42,000 years ago demonstrates that the colonisation of the Bismarck Archipelago occurred soon after that of Sahul. This provides the opportunity to consider the adaptation of small groups of people to a depauperate island environment. An analysis of a lithic assemblage from Buang Merabak was used to consider how

ABSTRACT Archaeology lends a critical perspective to research on social inequality due to the field’s unique access to deep history, emphasis on materiality, and explicit incorporation of multiple lines of evidence. This paper offers a concise overview of archaeological approaches aimed at students and scholars in other fields. We develop a categorization of disciplinary strategies, arguing that archaeologists

ABSTRACT This paper reviews the available vertebrate record from the Lesser Sunda Islands to explore the effect the Last Glacial Maximum had on human subsistence strategies. By focusing on vertebrate assemblages from Laili and Matja Kuru 2 in Timor Leste, Tron Bon Lei in Alor Island, and Here Sorot Entapa in Kisar, this paper investigates biodiversity and resource availability in these nearby islands

ABSTRACT Monumental architecture has long been associated with the rise of the State and societal inequality, yet recent studies have shown some small and relatively egalitarian societies also built large-scale architecture. This study posits that some of these groups utilized ‘institutional flexibility’ – a strategy of creating and then dismantling hierarchical power systems during limited periods

ABSTRACT This paper uses events following the 1878 discovery of a rich Lower Palaeolithic ‘living floor’ at Stoke Newington, London, to explore the social and economic relationships and imbalances that existed within Palaeolithic archaeology in the mid to late nineteenth century. It explores in particular the role of the British working classes in amassing the extant record, the biases they might have

ABSTRACT The Acheulean has long been considered a single, unified tradition. Decades of morphometric and technological evidence supports such an understanding by demonstrating that a single fundamental Bauplan was followed for more than 1.6 million years. What remains unknown is whether sites assigned to the Acheulean represent multiple socially-independent iterations of the same technological solution

ABSTRACT Andrew Sherratt’s ‘Water, soil and seasonality’, World Archaeology (1980), signposted a long-term debate surrounding early farming adaptations to riverine landscapes in western Asia and Europe. Recent research at Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia, a key case study in Sherratt’s ‘floodplain cultivation’ model, enables integrated, evidence-based assessment of the local hydrology and agroecology

ABSTRACT The popular prioritization of climate change issues over biodiversity loss in environmental archaeology and palaeoecology has been argued to be in part due to agenda-setting created by the ripple effects of widespread media coverage of climatic change. In this paper, we argue that direct scientific evidence for past human landscapes can act as a powerful tool in modern conservation efforts

ABSTRACT This paper is a cross-comparative examination of how tropical forested islands were populated by humans. It first describes the unique ecological conditions of these environments, how they fluctuated during glacial cycles, and the challenges and affordances they provided people. The paper then explores the global archaeological record, classifying modes of colonisation that led insular tropical

Published in World Archaeology (Vol. 54, No. 1, 2022)

ABSTRACT The rise of water transport technology enabled early modern humans to expand their habitable territory to insular environments. However, apart from intensive discussion for Wallacea, developmental process and regional variation of Palaeolithic seafaring remain unclear. To contribute this issue, the author presents a synthetic model for Palaeolithic seafaring in another region of the western

Published in World Archaeology (Vol. 54, No. 1, 2022)

ABSTRACT One of the most entrenched binary oppositions in archaeology and anthropology has been the agriculturalist vs hunter-gatherer-fisher dichotomy fuelling a debate that this paper tackles from the bottom-up by seeking to reconstruct full past diets. The Japanese prehistoric Jōmon cultures survived without fully-developed agriculture for more than 10,000 years. Here we compile a comprehensive

ABSTRACT Archaeological data have demonstrated that modern Florida was occupied by at least 14,550 years ago, but evidence of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene peoples (ca. 14,600–8,000 cal B.P.) is limited to far inland and upland settings, as more than half of Florida’s peninsula was drowned between ca. 21,000–6,000 cal B.P. Rising aquifer levels of the Late Pleistocene allowed some interior sites

Published in World Archaeology (Vol. 53, No. 5, 2021)

ABSTRACT Plazas are ubiquitous elements of community layout, defined as open space surrounded by or adjacent to structures. Functionally, plazas serve as public space for gatherings and ceremonial activities. At Cahokia Mounds, the largest pre-contact site in North America, the North Plaza puzzled archaeologists because of its unique location in a wetland. The construction of a mound and plaza group

ABSTRACT The archaeology of inundated cultural landscape sites is not new and is an important component of the global record, yet these sites are distinct from shipwrecks and other site types underwater. Just as on land, underwater sites are subject to a dynamic range of formation processes, which must be analytically controlled. However, there are lingering misconceptions about underwater sites, specifically

ABSTRACT Andean societies have undergone abrupt climate changes that have affected their water resources and habitable or cultivable land. This is the case for Lake Titicaca, which has experienced fluctuations up to 20 metres during the last three millennia. Although paleoenvironmental reconstructions have provided valuable data on these lake level variations, their resolution is often not sufficient

ABSTRACT California’s Northern Channel Islands contain an incredible record of terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene human occupation. Since the hunter-gatherer-fishers who created these sites relied heavily on marine resources, a critical aspect of understanding early settlement patterns is calculating distance to paleoshorelines. This has traditionally been accomplished using sea-level curves and

ABSTRACT The potential of submerged palaeolandscapes to address questions about global migrations, broad-scale climate and landscape change and human response to this has, to date, been concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere. The Southern Hemisphere has less land, more water and water barriers, higher floral and faunal endemicity and lower population but with indigenous populations that have maintained

ABSTRACT In many long-enduring coastal cultures, there are stories – sometimes mythologized – about times when pieces of land became separated from mainlands by submergence, a process that created islands where none existed before. Using examples from northwest Europe and Australia, this paper argues that many such stories recall times, often millennia ago, when sea level in the aftermath of the Last

ABSTRACT We analyze the finding of a lithic projectile point at more than 100 meters depth in the Beagle Channel (Tierra del Fuego, Argentina) in relation to submerged landscapes. On the one hand, this underwater evidence is examined as part of an inundated archaeological landscape supporting the hypothesized Pleistocene coastal dispersion in southern South America. On the other hand, the lithic projectile

(2021). Harvesting the winds, harvesting the rain: an introduction to the issue on Inhabiting tropical worlds. World Archaeology: Vol. 53, Inhabiting Tropical Worlds, pp. 563-578.

(2021). Subaltern assemblages. The archaeology of marginal places and identities. World Archaeology: Vol. 53, The Archaeology of Marginal Places and Identities, pp. 369-383.

ABSTRACT The immigrant’s journey is a paradigmatic example of the ‘betwixt and between’, both physically and socially ambiguous, suspended momentarily outside of normal society. For archaeologists studying nineteenth-century immigration around the British Empire, ‘institutions of immigration’ (emigrant and immigrant depots, quarantine stations, processing centres, etc.) provide access to this transitional

(2021). Debates and emerging issues in 2021. World Archaeology: Vol. 53, Debates and Emerging Issues in World Archaeology, pp. 173-174.

ABSTRACT Southeast Asian archaeological research often emphasizes upland-lowland dynamics in the development of premodern complex societies. This paper tracks upland-lowland dynamics in Pre-Angkorian (6th-8th century CE) Cambodia by focusing on land-use and economy along the Mekong River. Proto-urban settlements emerged throughout the Tonle Sap and Mekong Delta alluvial plains but also appeared at

ABSTRACT Tehran’s Archaeology of Garbage project was conducted in 2017–2018 and with the initial aim of monitoring the impacts of currency devaluation on poor people. In Districts 7 and 17, the team investigated two of the most decayed urban fabrics of Tehran as well as the garbage bags of 1004 poor marginalized families. Among these, we managed to find evidence of a forgotten social group, the ‘impoverished

ABSTRACT Largescale programs require complex and integrated infrastructures to carry out the aims of power. In the case of the WWII mass removal and incarceration of all Japanese Americans living on the west coast of the US, scholars have focused their attention on incarceration camps and landscapes far removed from towns and cities. This article instead examines the wartime civil control stations

ABSTRACT Nestled in a quiet part of Oulu, Finland, on an Island called Hietasaari, was a residential area called Vaakunakylä. Hietasaari was, from the 19th century onward, largely undeveloped with an oceanside beach amidst pines, small, cultivated fields and a modest number of expensive villas. Vaakunakylä was a working-class neighborhood, but city planners committed to developing the Island forced

ABSTRACT Artists have been making their mark on the world for at least 70,000 years. Some of the best known examples of what is commonly referred to as cave art are from the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe, at sites which are popular tourist attractions, their visitors wondering at the motivations of those responsible. In some ways, contemporary graffiti are not so dissimilar: passers-by stopping to view

ABSTRACT The article proposes a new interpretation of Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age warrior graves grounded in the ‘Rinaldone’ burial tradition of central Italy, 4th and 3rd millennia BC. In European archaeology, warrior graves are frequently thought to signal the rise of sociopolitical inequality rooted in metal wealth. The work questions the empirical and conceptual foundations of this reading

ABSTRACT The Early Pleistocene (2.58–0.78 Ma) was a period of major evolutionary changes in the hominin lineage. The progressive consolidation of bipedal locomotion, alongside increases in cranial capacity and behavioural flexibility, allowed early Homo to exploit an increasing diversity of resources and environmental settings within the changing landscapes of East Africa and beyond. These complex

ABSTRACT In this paper, I examine the relationship between technological and aesthetic shifts in Andean North Coast prestige ceramics and sociopolitical change by focusing on pottery as a form of information technology in a world without formal writing. To do so, I begin by defining two techno-aesthetic macro-traditions to emphasize the interconnections among technique and visual appearance, semantics

ABSTRACT Based on long term archaeological ethnography on the border island of Lesvos situated on Europe’s margins, this article explores the regimes of eating and the role of food practices in the refugee camp/processing centre of Moria. Starting from the double liminality of eating and border-crossing, it outlines and juxtaposes two regimes of corporeal life. The first is the biopolitical arena of

ABSTRACT We explore the Late Chalcolithic 3–4 to Early Bronze Age I pottery from Arslantepe by combining compositional, technological and morpho-typological analyses. The paper investigates to what extent economic and political changes affected the organisation of production in terms of natural resources, human labour, and practices. The wheel-finished vessels show a strong continuity in the raw materials

ABSTRACT Sails and textile technology played a key role in enabling mobility and thus shaping historical phenomena such as migration, trade, the acquisition and maintenance of imperial power in the ancient Mediterranean. Yet sails are nearly absent from analyses of ancient fleets, even in extensively studied cases like that of Classical Athens. This paper examines the demand and production of sailcloth

ABSTRACT This paper explores the entanglement of the innovation discourse with discourses of power. Innovation is a frequent topic of archaeological research, but its implications for how we understand flows of power between individuals, groups, and regions has seen little attention. Here, we argue that our innovation narratives often blindly reproduce hierarchical relations which place dynamic cores

ABSTRACT Low-density, agrarian-urban settlements have become a significant topic in the global archaeology of urbanism. The urban tradition of the Vietnamese can now be added to the relatively rare regional examples worldwide. Although the urban tradition of the Vietnamese has previously been defined in terms of the central citadels in cities like Hanoi, the citadels were actually located within extensive

ABTRACT In this paper we review the growing evidence of anthropogenic landscapespresent in the semi-deciduous neotropical forest biomes of eastern NW Argentina,which have remained relatively neglected in favour of arid to semi-arid western Andean regions. The evidence gathered in de El Alto-Ancasti provides animportant case study where multidisciplinary methodologies have beenapplied to sites that

ABSTRACT Studies of faunal discard reveal the everyday use of animal resources in the past. However, taphonomic processes, fragmentation due to butchery, equifinality, and other factors hamper identification of the practices responsible for creating accumulated faunal assemblages. In this paper, we suggest a way to reconceptualize mundane faunal waste from archaeological sites. We apply an everyday

ABSTRACT Africa has thus far contributed little to debates in the field of island archaeology. This paper explores the potential of São Tomé and Príncipe, a small island state in the Gulf of Guinea that may be the only country in the world where no archaeological fieldwork has yet been undertaken. This contrasts sharply with its importance as a focal point in the development of plantation economies

ABSTRACT In this study, evidence provided by written records generated after the conquest of Tortosa in 1148 and the results of archaeological survey have led to the identification of several farmland areas and their associated Andalusi settlements on both banks of the River Ebro, in the hinterland of Madīna Ṭurṭūsha. These field systems were formed by compact and discontinuous cultivation areas on

ABSTRACT Little is known about the lifeways of the commoner populations that supported the expansive pre-industrial cities of Southeast Asia. Archaeologically driven understandings are constrained by the fact that the architecture and much of the material culture utilized by ordinary citizens were made from perishable materials, and many living floors were also raised above the actual ground surface

ABSTRACT Carbohydrate consumption in hunter-gatherer societies has been much debated, with dietary estimates from studies of modern hunter-gatherers used as a reference standard for modern human nutrition. However, relatively little is known about the role of carbohydrates in past hunter-gatherer diets in temperate Europe because farming has been the main mode of subsistence since early prehistory

ABSTRACT Human relations are established and maintained through the sharing of food. Indeed, it has been asserted that eating and drinking play a vital role in the creation of lasting bonds. The Inka state, familiar with the benefits brought by sharing food and drinks, purposely staged extravagant banquets that were accompanied by songs and dances. For an expansive state such as the Inka, the annexation

(2021). Process archaeology. World Archaeology: Vol. 53, Process Archaeology, pp. 1-14.

ABSTRACT In this paper I build on the process philosophy of Whitehead and on enactive approachs to hermeneutics, to suggest that if we want to conceive of archaeological practice in terms of a process archaeology, then rather than characterizing it as ‘digging up the past’, it is better to think of it as digging up concrescences. From the perspective of enactive hermeneutics, no artifact (from past

ABSTRACT Beginning with a detailed example of ravens accessing food not immediately accessible, this article documents the fact that tool-making and tool-using are a creative kinetic process that engages mindful bodies in the course of their animate lives. It shows how thinking in movement and kinesthetic memory are basic aspects of synergies of meaningful movement in tool-making and tool-using and

ABSTRACT We can only understand what is it to be human by understanding the modes of human becoming. This paper looks at the creative aspect of human becoming taking hands and tools as the focus of reference. I advocate a process archaeology of mind where thinking is thinging. Human cognitive becoming is cast in terms of metaplasticity and creative material engagement. Humans are plastic creatures